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Why have I pursued this?

Since Mary departed in 2010 I have repeatedly asked myself why I continued to doggedly pursue trying to turn those almost 200,000 words into a readable book. While Mary was driven to write the story for my sons before she died, they had read it in its raw form, they had the information.

I, Liz was slightly committed to the challenge to see if I was capable of making my story ‘readable’, while paradoxically filled with horror at the thought of people I had to face actually knowing my story. As recently as when the printed book was finally official; I was still questioning why.

A conversation about the book has reinforced why – what drove Liz was the anger at the naivety expressed by people when trying to ‘tell’ my story. For thirty years I suppressed my shame and fear – fear of rejection, fear of disbelief, fear of my story being dismissed or diminished. All of these fears have been fulfilled many times over in my feeble attempts to be heard.

I had been warned to expect negative comments/feedback, trolls, people willing to dismiss my story. But it was a conversation with someone who, like most people I have encountered, really has no comprehension of the complete destruction severe trauma causes. Trying to suppress my anger as I was being told that it was up to me to be happy, I had to let it go, it was in the past and they were only bad memories I stated, ‘No that’s the problem I don’t remember’. The response was ‘You must or you wouldn’t have been able to write about it’.

If only it were that simple! Many of those dismissive comments and reactions are in the book but many more are not. I realise there are two things I hope to achieve by writing this book:

1. To hopefully educate people that life is not as simple as they want to believe it is

2. That someone will read this and actually confirm my experience – tell me this is ‘normal’